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FLCLap...
2005-05-01 16:10:53
Setback No. 1: The third volume of my brand new FLCL box has a weird problem. Since I don't have a DVD player, I'm playing it on my computer' DVD rom drive, and when I get to the most intense scenes in the last two episodes, where the frames change completely every one or two frames or so, it starts lagging! Or something, I don't know the correct term... but the video and audio simultaneously grind to a halt, and start up again once the intense scene is over. It happens in the exact same places every time, too. Now, what could cause this?
Suggestion 1: Sumthin' wrong with the disk.
In this case, I need to get a new one from the store where I bought it. I don't think this is it, though, because there are no scratches anywhere on the disk, but mainly the fact that the problem only occurs in places where the whole screen changes very quickly makes me thinks it's somethin else.
Suggestion 2: Bad software.
I'm using VLC Media Player, which is the only program I have that plays DVD's. (I haven't been able to play it in WMP, it gives an error, saying "Windows Media Player cannot play this DVD because a problem occurred with digital copyright protection.") Could it be that this program has a problem with video sequences with very high bitrates? I don't know enough about digital video to know.
Suggestion 3: Bad DVD rom.
Maybe my DVD rom has a problem equivalent to suggestion 2. That is, it can't read fast enough to keep up with very high bitrates. In this case, the problem will be solved as soon as I get off my butt and buy a DVD player. Unless...
Suggestion 4: A combination.
Obviously, the sequences on the disk that suffer from the problem have a higher bitrate than others. (This seems obvious to me, anyway.) But could the person who encoded the MPEG2 stream on the DVD really have made an encode containing parts with bitrates that are too high for even a regular DVD player to handle? This just seems too stupid to be true, doesn't it? I don't even know what kinds of bitrates DVD players can handle normally. Surely those guys making the FLCL PAL DVD's couldn't have overlooked this? If they haven't, then we're back to suggestion 3.
Tomorrow, I'm going over to a friend's house to play the disk on her DVD player. I'm crossing my fingers that it will play without problems.
Setback No. 2: PAL footage sucks enormous elphant balls. Well, not PAL footage in itself, as it has been explained many times in the forums, but that devilish technique called Full Field Blending, used for converting NTSC footage to PAL. It seems almost all anime released in PAL format suffers from this. In short, it makes it very hard to remove the interlacing to restore the original frames, and impossible to do without ugliness. I'm hoping for my thread on this in the video forum to yield some helpful results. Otherwise, I'm stuck with making my new video with so-so footage. I'm never buying Australian discs again, just because they're cheaper... - FLCL box! Wai! 2005-04-29 07:56:38 My FLCL box arrived! Yay! I don't know how I would have made it through the weekend without it! Nice stuff, too; a pretty booklet with each volume with great translation notes about all the anime references and puns, plus interviews and stuff. And a pretty, shiny box to put on top of the bookshelf. ^^; Easily worth the measly $50.
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Haruko is on her way! Yay!
2005-04-26 15:36:50
Yes! I finally found a european site that has the FLCL DVD box in stock. If you haven't heard of the store, I recommen checking it out at axelmusic.com. Free worldwide shipping and pretty much 24/7 customer support. Great place. Anyway, the box is on it's way, and since I finally succeeded in selling off my three excess Excel Saga DVD's, it won't cut a huge hole in my budget either.
Meanwhile, work on the new FLCL video has been slow. Other, more real-life things have "gotten in the way", so to speak, so I haven't worked on it for a while. I'll probably get a boost of steam once the DVD's arrive...
Also, I've gotten this really silly idea for a short comedy/parody vid, that I might actually do before I finish the FLCL vid. It's really such an obvious idea; I don't expect high scores for originality for it, because everyone's gonna think "why didn't I think of that?" Except you sort of have to know your seiyuus to get the point, so I guess it's not that obvious to the non-die-hard fans. Anyhow, it will be a small tribute to Mitsuishi Kotono, who does the voices of Excel Excel, Mink (Dragon Half) and Misato Katsuragi, among others. As they say in Engrish: "Look forward to it!" -
@Scintilla
2005-04-14 17:01:49
Okey. this is just freaky... I just decided to look around at some other people's journals to see if anyone had written anything interesting. I haven't done that much before and just felt like it. SO the first name that popped into my head was Scintilla (I really love a couple of his vids) and I look upp his journal. The first thing I see is _my own_ screen name in the title of the second entry on the first page. With an @-sign in front of it. What the fsck? Then I read the entry and realize it's a comment to something I wrote in my own journal a while back. So what's the deal? The comment seemed to be directed to me personally. And some other entries, also beginning with the @-sign, seemed to be directed directly to the person who's name was in the title. So, was I supposed to get some notification of that entry being made? Is Scintilla getting one from this entry? Or what? (?_?) Is there some kind of secret comment-on-journal-entries system in effect here, or am I just being paranoid?
Also, while I'm at it with asking st00pid questions; how do you add things to your favorite anime list? I've looked and looked all over the place, but haven't found a way to do it. I even read the guide on how to use the org, but it didn't say there either.
"Jag har bara konsonanter..." / "I only have consonants..." -
2005-04-13 09:29:06
Worked on the vid for a couple of hours today, when I should have been at a lecture in Cognitive Psycology. Bad Me. Anyway, it's coming along really nicely. I haven't worked on it for a while, so when I watched the old alpha version I got a few new ideas that I wanted to do right away. It's turning out to be a really good idea to spend this much time on a vid; you get new ideas and perspectives on how to take the old ideas to the next level when you put it aside and do something else for a week or two.
Right now, I'm experimenting like crazy with different effects in Premiere, and I'm loving it! With this vid, I had a picture from the beginning of a video crammed full of creative effects, and I'm getting closer to that idea every time I edit. I've done about 85% of the first two thirds of the song and nothing at all on the last third. I'm having trouble with what to do with the climax of the song. I'm basically choosing between a more romantic, less hard core action-synched version and, well, one that is the opposite of that. It will be an important decision, but I think It will work itself out once I've finished the parts around that point.
I'm very happy with some of the effects. Some still have a very random feel to them, but some are starting to feel just right. Well timed, with just the right amount of motion to fit the music, and also... there's the colors...
You've seen FLCL, right? (If not, do it today.) So you know what I mean when I talk about the wonderfully artistic coloring. All the shades in a scene always flow together in a beautiful harmony, but the color schemes are completely different by day and by night, for instance. Another example is the climax of episode four, where the colors are very peculiar. The biggest challenge I've met so far in making this vid is to make the coloring work FOR the overall effect of the vid and not against it. Mixing clips from different scenes gets ugly and complicated when the coloring is so totally different. Also, I'm doing some interesting experiments in color effects, like B&W combined with Tint and sometimes Extract.
And there will be masks. Quite a few masks.
JOURNAL: LenWidleheyt (Linus Lindholm)
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